


War Is Not For Children

by BCRebel



Series: What If We All Die Young? [1]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate, Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Animorphs AU, Gen, Rachel is an alien, Sarah and Helena are still twins, no one is a clone AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-31
Updated: 2014-03-31
Packaged: 2018-01-17 17:46:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1396843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BCRebel/pseuds/BCRebel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, Sarah forgets what it was like - life as a human -  but she never forgets what they're fighting for.</p><p>Animorphs AU - Sarah's musings on her allies and the war they have no choice but to fight.</p>
            </blockquote>





	War Is Not For Children

**Author's Note:**

  * For [piggy09](https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/gifts).



> If you aren't familiar with Animorphs, a quick summary: A group of teens finds a dying alien in a construction site they decided to take a short cut through one night. The alien tells them about the Yeerks, a race of parasitic slugs that can live in the brains of sentient species and control them, and they're already on Earth in the middle of a covert invasion. The alien offers them a technology unique to his species, allowing them to acquire the DNA of any living creature they can touch, and then transform into that animal at will - with the stipulation that should they spend longer than 2 hours in that form, they'll be stuck there forever. The books follow this group of teens as they fight a guerrilla war against the Yeerks while trying to keep their identities a secret. 
> 
> It's really dark for a kids series, and it was a defining part of my childhood, so I decided it would be cool to fuse it with my current fandom, and this was the result. 
> 
> (Another quick point - there's some handwavy suspension of disbelief required here. Cosima, Alison, and Beth aren't clones and aren't identical or related. Sarah and Helena however are still twins. Rachel is an alien, but has a human morph that looks a little like Sarah and Helena, because she created it using DNA from the whole group)

Sometimes, Sarah forgets what it was like, living as human. She has hazy memories of her life from _before._ Nothing specific, she remembers details – her last foster home, the last high school she almost dropped out of, the town she lived in before she came here – like they were told to her, a life lived by someone else. She can remember what it was like to be human though, most of the time. Waking up in a bed, brushing her teeth and seeing Helena's face in the mirror (it's not Sarah's face, not anymore – maybe it never was), eating food she didn't have to catch for herself. The memories are all so vague, she isn't certain whether or not she even misses it anymore.

It's all a pointless hypothetical at this point. 'Would you choose to be human again, if you could?' the point is she _can't_ , and all that thought gets her is questions that don't want answers. Would she take it back? Undo the night that brought them together, gave them this power (curse), put this responsibility on their shoulders? The question has no easy answer. If she says yes, then where does that leave humanity? They're just kids, but there's no one else waiting to take up this burden.

 _They're just kids,_ but they're not, though – not anymore. Sarah's a falcon now, a winged predator with a human mind fighting a war meant for the whole human race, not just Sarah and her little club. The others can make it look like they're still kids, but it's an act. They've all seen things, done things, in this war that have stripped them of that label a thousand times over. There's nothing _just kids_ about any of them anymore.

Alison likes to pretend that none of it is real – puts on her 'normal' face the same way she puts on her panther morph. Alison goes through the motions of her mundane, ordinary life as if it's still going to be there when this is all over – as if they don't know, down in their bones, that even if they win there's no going back for any of them. She's in this fight as much as any of them, but where Sarah fights to keep humanity free, Alison fights because she wants her old life back, and Sarah doesn't have the heart to tell her she can't have it (that nothing will bring Beth back).

Cosima thinks this is the most amazing thing that has _ever_ happened, and the war they got with it is just a secondary detail – important to deal with in the short term, when they must, but ultimately irrelevant. The morphing technology they've been granted has turned Cosima's world upside down, in the best way possible, and she wouldn't give it back for anything.

(Cosima sees a gift where Sarah can only see a curse).

'Aliens, Sarah! Real life, honest to god aliens! and they gave us the power to turn into any animal we want! Can't you see how huge this is?' Cosima had told Sarah in the days following the meeting in the construction site, never mind the fact that the only alien they found that night that wasn't an evil slug bent on enslaving all intelligent life had died horribly right in front of them. The sentiment had set the tone for all of Cosima's involvement in the war they've been fighting, far too excited by the possibilities of this new world to think about its realities.

If they win, Cosima has the best shot out of all of them at going on to live the life she wants for herself. With the Yeerks defeated the only aliens left will be the ones ushering in the future she's always dreamed of (although even the Andalites can fall far short of Cosima's lofty expectations). If they lose... Sarah doesn't like to think about specifics, but Cosima has the furthest to fall. The war hasn't touched her the way it has the rest of them. It took Sarah's humanity from her within the first week, months later it robbed Alison of Beth. Rachel was born to this war and Helena has never had anything to lose. Sarah knows that, on some level deep down, all of them are fighting for the sake of Cosima's optimism. Sometimes it's the only light they have left.

Beth had been the best of them, a born leader with a good head on her shoulders who knew how to keep the rest of them going through the worst of it. She'd been a friend to Sarah, there for her at one of her lowest points, even before the construction site. Fresh from another shitty foster home, ready to drop out of school (for good this time), Sarah had been on the edge of running away and giving up on the future she'd always been told she needed to worry about. Beth had reached out to the loner new kid, introduced her to Alison and Cosima, and almost given her a reason to stick it out one last time. Two weeks later Sarah woke up in the body of a falcon, two hour window long closed, and realized there are much worse ways to screw up your future than dropping out of high school.

Beth died a hero. She died alone, fighting for the lives of her friends, in a cave no one but the Yeerks and the club know exists. Even if by some miracle they win this war, Sarah isn't sure if the people whose freedom Beth died for will ever even know her name. She doesn't know what the Yeerks did with Beth's body, but there's never been a funeral. It's been months, but Alison can't tell her best friend's parents that she's dead. They still haven't given up hope that she'll come back.

There's a light Sarah remembers (thinks she remembers) that used to live in Alison's eyes when they first met. Like Cosima's enthusiasm for life, it had been another piece of what kept them all going. Sarah hasn't seen that light since the rest of the club came back from a mission without Beth and told Sarah what had happened. Sarah doesn't know if Alison blames her for not being there (there had been no place for a falcon in their plan to infiltrate the Yeerk pool), but she knows she'll never stop blaming herself.

Rachel is an exception to a lot of the rules that define the rest of their club of freedom fighters. For one thing Rachel isn't human ( _and never has been_ Sarah always finds herself adding, because neither of them are human now). Rachel is an Andalite, one of the 'good guy' aliens – at least that's how the club had seen them until they realized nothing was that simple. Rachel had been a junior scientist, recently assigned to an Andalite dome ship that was destroyed by Yeerks in orbit above earth. There were no other survivors, but through sheer luck (or fate) the club managed to beat the Yeerks to the wreckage off the coast and get Rachel out in one piece.

Rachel doesn't like humans very much. Primitives, she calls them. Awkwardly evolved monkeys with no tails and only two legs (don't get her started on the eyes). Rachel doesn't believe humanity is ready for the technology the Andalites possess and likes to cite Sarah as an example: <My brother broke our most important law to give a technological _gift_ to you primitives and it took this _nothlit_ less than a week to screw it up. >

 _Nothlit_ is a term for what Sarah has become, trapped in a form that isn't her own (it is hers now, though - when she looks back at photos of herself from _before_ all she sees is Helena).

Rachel doesn't think much of humans, but Earth is a key battleground in the Andalite's war with the Yeerks. Rachel was on the front lines for a reason, and she'll be damned if she's not going to see this through. Rachel was barely more than a child in the eyes of her people when she was stranded on Earth, but she's seen more of this war than many Andalites ever will, and Rachel was never _just a kid._

Rachel isn't human, but she sometimes tries to live like one when the need arises. She has a human morph, cobbled together from DNA taken from the club's four human members. Her human face is frustratingly familiar and alien all at once. Sarah can almost see herself in it (it's Helena she almost sees, but as best they can tell Helena's DNA is her own), but it's like looking into a warped mirror and nothing looks quite the way it should. (Sarah remembers what it was like to see Helena's face in the mirror. She's never seen Rachel's)

Now Helena...

Helena is Sarah.

Helena is not Sarah. Helena was homeless, that night in the construction site. Trying to catch some sleep in the shelter provided by some unused building materials, she'd been drawn to the sounds of Sarah's group when they decided to take a shortcut through the site. Helena thinks it must have been fate. Sarah isn't so sure, but she can't explain it any other way, and even if she had a better explanation she doesn't think it's an argument she would win. When Helena is sure of something (she and Sarah – they have a connection), she's rarely wrong.

After aliens, meeting a girl who shared her face had barely fazed Sarah. Her best guess is that Helena is her twin – a sister who slipped through the cracks of the foster system that did such a fine job raising Sarah. At the time Sarah hadn't wanted a sister, didn't have time to help Helena function like a normal member of society while also keeping up with school and trying to deal with the sudden alien threat hiding everywhere and nowhere all at once. That is until school stopped being an issue.

Now, Helena keeps Sarah human (keeping Helena human keeps Sarah human). Helena spent years on the streets before she met Sarah. They tried, briefly, to insert Helena into what had been Sarah's life, but the results hadn't gone as well as they'd hoped. They gave up after a week when it became clear these foster parents weren't going to let Helena stay any longer than those that had come before them kept Sarah.

Helena and Rachel both live in one of the older buildings on Cosima's parents' farm (Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic they call it now, but as a farm it had many more buildings than the Niehaus's clinic requires). All Andalites need to get by is some decent grass to run on, and Helena has taken to doing most of her eating in-morph. Sarah lives in the woods nearby, and as far as Helena is concerned hunting for her food with her sister certainly beats digging through trash in the city.

Sarah keeps Helena going. The poor girl had been a shadow of a person when they'd first met, but where the war has done nothing but grind the others down, the world had already done to Helena on its own. The ability to morph had given her back her spirit, and finding a family – and a cause – had given her a purpose. Now Helena is becoming a light like the one that had gone out in Alison. Her optimism isn't blind the way Cosima's can be. Having found her entire life the same day the Andalite had handed them a war, Helena knows how much there is to lose, but she's willing to fight anything the Yeerks can throw at them to keep her new family safe.

Sarah doesn't know what she'd do without Helena. Sometimes the temptation to fly away and never look back is so great Sarah can hardly stand it, but as easy as it would be to give up, forget that there ever was a Sarah Manning and live the rest of her life like the falcon is all there ever was, deep down she knows Helena needs her. Remembering Helena brings back Cosima, Alison, the memory of Beth, and even Rachel, and Sarah knows this war can't be escaped – it can only be won (or fought, until they're all dead and there's no one left to take up the call).

The Yeerks are here, all around them, hiding in plain sight, and slowly tightening an invisible strangle hold around humanity that the Andalites haven't done nearly enough to stop – but they've suffered set backs, lost time and resources, tried and failed to take over key politicians, all thanks a rogue group of highly trained Andalite warriors. That is, as far as they know. Three kids, a bird, and an alien isn't much in the face of a full scale invasion, but so far it's been enough. Someday, maybe they'll have allies, maybe the secrets will stop and humanity can fight the war it's already losing to aliens it doesn't know exist, but until then the five of them will hold out for as long as they can.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm dedicating this fic to sharkodactyl over on tumblr, because she accidentally inspired this in her tags on a post last Saturday. Also because the minific machine that is her blog has shown me just how great a good Orphan Black AU can be. I doubt I'd have gone through with this insane crossover without that added inspiration.
> 
> I'd love to write more for this AU. I have a lot of thoughts that didn't fit into this story, so if you're interested in seeing this universe fleshed out, let me know :)


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